Histrograms

[cjrrussell]

Hey there everyone.

I have just bought my first dSLR and have been reading lots to get to grips with it. I have read about making sure you look at histograms when reviewing your shots, trouble is that i dont know what a 'good' histogram looks like.

Hopefully someone can explain this to me.


Thanks in advance

Chris

[Forseti]

Welcome to the forum Chris. Read this and digest - there will be a test afterwards. http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tu...stograms.shtml

[donoreo]

There is not such thing as a perfect look histogram! In general, what you want is a fairly even distribution that goes end to end. However, if you are taking a picture of something that is either very dark or very bright (ie snow) then the histogram will seem all squished to one end.

[jinky]

I used to follow advice that said always have your histogram showing and did find it useful in helping make adjusrtments for differing situations. After a recent tip though I keep my LCD showing clipped highlights and find that much more useful as a histogram pattern can vary so much depending upon scene make up

[chris-p]

Like Paul my image review is set to show any clipped highlights for the couple of seconds the shot shows up.

The idea of the histogram is it represents the brightness range that the camera can capture. On the left hand end is dark (black) and on the right hand end is light (white). If the light levels fall outside this histogram they are referred to as being "clipped". In otherwords, when the sky is too bright for the current settings, it gets clipped to flat white and all the pixels are on the very right hand end of the axis. The same happens if there are areas that are too dark except they get clipped to black and are effectively off the left hand end of the histogram

As Donoreo said, there really isn't such a thing as a "perfect" histogram.